Children's home meets retirement home

Children's home meets senior citizens' home

The aim of this project is to connect seniors in inpatient facilities with children in children's homes. The aim is to enable encounters and subsequently stable relationships, thus creating a coherent togetherness.
Initially, regular group meetings will be held to exchange ideas, play games, get to know each other and create things together. In the course of the project, more and more individual connections / couples / small groups will be enabled to exchange, visit and experience together on a regular basis.

The children gave the senior citizens a particularly wonderful experience. They organized a wellness afternoon, during which the senior citizens received a hand massage and had their nails painted. Both children and senior citizens had a lot of fun.

PARTNER

Schifferkinderheim Mannheim e.V.

Seniorenzentrum Rheinauer Tor, Evangelische Heimstiftung

THEME
Children's home meets retirement home

YEAR
2023

Impressions of Christmas baking

As part of a Christmas-themed project week, the children of the Schifferkinderheim joined forces with the senior citizens of the Rheinauer Tor senior citizens' center and their staff to create a wonderful and unifying atmosphere through various activities.

To get into the mood, the children and senior citizens gathered in the cafeteria to sing Christmas carols together. This created a wonderful, festive atmosphere that fostered connection and community. Participants contributed their own ideas by requesting songs and reciting poems. By the end of the meeting, everyone had created a colorful and inspiring program together.

Baking cookies together and decorating them with icing and colorful beads created a particularly cheerful and hard-working atmosphere, which resulted in many heart-warming moments between young and old. As the week progressed, the participants had the opportunity to take part in various creative activities according to their interests and to get together with like-minded people.

The project week concluded with an impressive reading by a senior citizen who has been blind since birth, who recited a Christmas story in Braille. This special experience left a lasting impression on the children and senior citizens. Over drinks and cookies, she answered many of the children's questions about the methodology of reading in Braille.

Everyone involved can look back on an enriching week in which everyone contributed to the success with their own uniqueness and new, deeper connections between children and senior citizens were forged.

Impressions:

A girl sat down next to a senior citizen and explained that she was her favorite senior citizen. They held hands and the girl noticed that the woman had very soft hands. She expressed the wish to go to the retirement home on her own to visit her after the project week.
After decorating cookies together, one senior citizen said that children are simply part of Christmas. This wonderful experience brought back memories of his childhood and Christmas feelings from the past.